Preheat a dish in the oven and then drop the gnocchi into a large saucepan of salted boiling water. As it bobs up to the surface of the water, it is cooked. Usually this takes only a minute or two. Drain and place in the heated dish. Cover with the Gruyère and sprinkle with white pepper and nutmeg. Put under the grill until the cheese is golden and bubbling.

Sixteen

SIXTEEN

Despite the upset of having Eggy as her screen husband, and regardless of the snog with him and the shocking evidence of his affair with the casting director which had ended yesterday’s working day, Sally was feeling high about being back in the acting saddle.

She wondered now why she had taken so much time out. She really enjoyed the frantic camaraderie of a location shoot. The laughs with the make-up and wardrobe department, joking with the crew while queueing to get the lunchtime catering tray, and sitting under canvas or on a bus with them all to eat it. Location catering had improved a lot since the old days, or perhaps this time it was because there was French money in the film, the caterers themselves were French, and thus naturally it was de rigueur to serve wine at lunchtime. Not that Sally touched a drop on set. She’d be far too worried about forgetting her lines. Also, after she’d reached fifty she found that drinking at lunchtime made her feel terribly tired for the rest of the day. But it certainly loosened up the camera crew.

Lunch on a British film set was a scant fifty minutes; here the déjeuner spread out to become the customary French two hours, giving her enough time to eat, relax and study the script for the afternoon’s scenes.

She had risen that morning, dressed in the dark and made her way down to the waiting car. Eggy was already sitting inside grinning.

‘I thought while we shared the car in we could go through lines,’ he said.

Sally had been amazed that yesterday her words had come out in the right places and in the correct order, so was very happy to agree. They both had three speaking scenes today. One easy scene with few words, set inside an apartment in Monaco. Then lunch. After that a tricky scene, with lots of dialogue, to be filmed on a nearby beach, where they had to have a heated argument, much to the delight of onlookers, played by local extras. The final scene of the day was on the same beach as it started to grow dark, the two bungling petty crooks – she and Eggy – trying to climb into a boat and speed away.

But despite Sally’s high hopes, so far this morning’s scene had run to twelve takes.